StatelyDB vs Amazon DynamoDB

Complexity vs. Clarity

Amazon DynamoDB is one of the most powerful and scalable databases in the world. It is the engine that powers Amazon.com and countless other hyperscale services. But that power comes with a steep learning curve and significant complexity. Using DynamoDB effectively requires deep expertise and forces your engineering teams to spend more time architecting around the database's constraints than they do building your product.

StatelyDB is built on top of DynamoDB because we believe in its power, but we abstract away its complexity. We provide a clear, intuitive developer experience that gives you all the scalability and reliability of DynamoDB without the operational pain and development friction. Stop building your own custom infrastructure on top of raw database primitives and start accelerating your roadmap.

The High Cost of a "Simple" Database

DynamoDB's API seems simple, but using it correctly in a large application is anything but. To achieve the performance and scale it promises, teams must adopt complex, non-obvious patterns like single table design, key overloading, and manual data versioning. This creates a significant drag on the business:

You Need Specialized Experts

Effective DynamoDB data modeling is a specialized skill. Your team will spend months learning its intricacies, or you will have to hire expensive, hard to find experts. This creates knowledge silos and slows down your entire organization.

Development is Slow and Awkward

As our blog post "Data modeling in DynamoDB is awkward" details, developers are forced to think in terms of partitions and sort keys instead of a logical data model. This leads to complex, brittle application code that is difficult to write and even harder to maintain.

Change is Risky and Expensive

DynamoDB is "schemaless," which puts the entire burden of data consistency on your application. Every time your data model needs to evolve, your engineers must manually coordinate application and data changes, a process that is slow, error prone, and often a source of production outages.

The StatelyDB Advantage

Power without the Pain

StatelyDB provides an intelligent abstraction layer that solves these challenges, allowing any developer to be productive with a DynamoDB backed store from day one.

Intuitive Data Modeling

With StatelyDB's Elastic Schema™, you define your data in a clear, logical way using types and objects. Our SDKs then generate type safe client code for you. You work with Customers and Orders, not generic Items with overloaded keys. This makes your code cleaner, safer, and radically faster to write.

Built-in Advanced Functionality

Why spend months of engineering time building features that should be part of the database? StatelyDB includes powerful, out of the box capabilities that are extremely difficult to build on top of DynamoDB. Our Efficient Data Synchronization API, for example, provides a simple primitive for delta sync that can save 60% or more on read costs and is essential for building modern realtime and offline capable applications.

Strategic Flexibility and Governance

StatelyDB is designed to give you more control, not less.

  • Multi-Cloud Optionality: By building on our abstraction layer, you are not locked into DynamoDB. Our unified API allows you to migrate to other storage backends in the future without a painful rewrite.
  • Built in Governance: Your schema serves as a living data catalog, providing a clear, auditable record of your data models and how they change over time.
  • Full Data Sovereignty: With our Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) model, your data resides in a DynamoDB table inside your own AWS account, giving you maximum security and control.

Power without the Pain

StatelyDB provides an intelligent abstraction layer that solves these challenges, allowing any developer to be productive with a DynamoDB backed store from day one.

Intuitive Data Modeling

With StatelyDB's Elastic Schema™, you define your data in a clear, logical way using types and objects. Our SDKs then generate type safe client code for you. You work with Customers and Orders, not generic Items with overloaded keys. This makes your code cleaner, safer, and radically faster to write.

Built-in Advanced Functionality

Why spend months of engineering time building features that should be part of the database? StatelyDB includes powerful, out of the box capabilities that are extremely difficult to build on top of DynamoDB. Our Efficient Data Synchronization API, for example, provides a simple primitive for delta sync that can save 60% or more on read costs and is essential for building modern realtime and offline capable applications.

Strategic Flexibility and Governance

StatelyDB is designed to give you more control, not less.

  • Multi-Cloud Optionality: By building on our abstraction layer, you are not locked into DynamoDB. Our unified API allows you to migrate to other storage backends in the future without a painful rewrite.
  • Built in Governance: Your schema serves as a living data catalog, providing a clear, auditable record of your data models and how they change over time.
  • Full Data Sovereignty: With our Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) model, your data resides in a DynamoDB table inside your own AWS account, giving you maximum security and control.
Amazon DynamoDB
StatelyDB
Multi-Cloud Strategy
Locks you into the AWS ecosystem.
True Portability: Unified API provides a path to other backends, eliminating vendor lock in.
Advanced Features
Provides raw primitives. Features like delta sync must be custom built, a major engineering investment.
Batteries Included: Powerful features like SyncList for delta sync are built in, saving months of engineering effort.
Schema Evolution
Manual and high risk. The burden of managing data compatibility is entirely on your application code.
Elastic Schema™: Built in, version aware schema makes changes safe and predictable. Breaking changes are impossible.
Developer Experience
Low level, verbose SDK. Application code is filled with boilerplate for data mapping and validation.
High Level SDK: Work with type safe, generated code. Radically less code to write and maintain.
Data Modeling
Complex, non obvious patterns (single table design, key overloading) requiring deep expertise.
Intuitive Schema: Define a logical data model with types. StatelyDB handles the optimized physical storage automatically.

Build What Your Users Need, Not What Your Database Demands

Stop architecting around the limitations of your database. StatelyDB gives you the unparalleled scale and reliability of DynamoDB, wrapped in a developer experience that is designed to help you move fast and operate flawlessly.

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